Sessions at SXSW Interactive 2012 about Health on Tuesday 13th March

Need to recharge? iPhone or Tablet going dead? Feet hurting? Come relax in the iTriage Power-Up Lounge. Plug in your electronics at the charge stations and grab a healthy snack to refuel! And while you're recharging on the comfy couches, learn about the #1 downloaded healthcare app that allows you to take charge of your health!

Initiated by the US Air Force Medical Services, the Federal Health Futures Group has brought together the Surgeons General of the Army, Navy and Air Force, the Deputy Surgeon General of the United States, the Veteran’s Administration and many departments within the Health and Human Services Agency to identify ways in which Health and Health outcomes can be dramatically improved. In exploring the idea of "Health as a Team Sport," members of the Health Futures Group joined forces with game designers to explore games that can help improve public health and create the environment within which individuals can thrive in good times and bad.

Multiple dimensions were explored.

At the individual level: Getting more exercise, improving diet, dealing with illness, preventing disease, recovering from trauma and illness.

At the team level: Coaching groups of health professionals to work together amongst themselves to increase health, recovery, thriving.

In the community: In improving teamwork and collaboration between the formal healthcare and the informal family and friend networks.

At the government level: to improve the impact and effectiveness of policy, research and regulation.

This interactive panel will include a thorough discussion of the games designed to meet these challenges, the results obtained thus far, and identify specific future steps that the panelists could take to better leverage games in improving Health outcomes.

Electronic health records have the potential for enormous good, but in order for them to live up to their full potential, information about patients -- their symptoms, diagnoses, allergic reactions, medical backgrounds, family histories -- must take the form of standardized, structured, easy-to-manipulate data. One obvious way to get there is to tightly structure the way that doctors create the medical record. As a result, physicians are under increasing pressure to abandon unrestricted natural language and the clinical narrative, and turn the medical documentation process into a jungle of pull-down menus, checkboxes, and restricted vocabularies. In this presentation I argue that the results could be catastrophic, I make the case for preserving the clinical narrative, and I argue for a practical way out of the dilemma: using natural language processing technology to produce the structured records we need, while still allowing physicians the freedom of unrestricted clinical language.